Strategic planning and emotions: the relevance of an emotional dimension for the balanced scorecard

Emotional aspect is a challenge in achieving goals and performing strategic planning within the organizations. Such elements are not always taken into consideration in businesses as they interfere with a positive organizational climate. This is a crucial fact since it promotes employees’ joy. In this paper we suggest a fifth dimension in the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) considering employees’ emotions alongside the the four Kaplan and Norton's strategic aspects. To this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight employees of the IT at two higher education institutions in Brazil. We collected data through the registration, analysis, and coding, which mapped the primary emotions described by the employees facing the challenges to implement the strategic planning and seek the results sought by the company organization. The bibliographic research was conducted upon scientific digital databases. From this research, we found emotions such as joy, happiness, motivation, contentment, love, pride, satisfaction, sadness, frustration, and anxiety inside the people involved in strategic activities. We suggest a BSC dimension, i.e., 'Emotions', to consider employee well-being, valuing the organization's more structured planning addressed to maintenance the positive climate, improved performance, and employee engagement to deliver the desired results.